A leading Australian security provider has become the latest company to walk away from the government’s asylum-seeker detention camps on Pacific islands, following in the footsteps of Spanish construction giant Ferrovial.
The centres in tiny Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island — where asylum-seekers who try to reach Australia by boat are sent — have been slammed by Australian and international refugee and human rights advocates for their conditions.
Wilson Security, which has provided security at the centres since 2012, said it would not tender for further services after the current contract ends in October 2017.
The provision of such services were “not in line with (the company’s) long-term strategic priorities”, it said in a statement.
The size of the contracts is believed to be large, with Canberra awarding a 20-month A$1.22bn (US$920mn) contract to Transfield, now Ferrovial’s Broadspectrum, in 2014.
But service providers have been subjected to campaigns such as No Business in Abuse amid claims that some asylum-seekers held in the camps have suffered sexual assault.
One of Australia’s biggest pension funds, HESTA, last year divested from its Aus$23mn stake in Transfield saying that claims of rights breaches at the centres were contrary to international law and therefore its policies.
Ferrovial, which owns London’s Heathrow airport, said in May when it was finalising a takeover of Sydney-based Broadspectrum that the detention services were not core to the acquisition and “not a strategic activity in Ferrovial’s portfolio”.
Wilson’s announcement comes two weeks after Canberra agreed to close the Manus camp following a PNG Supreme Court ruling in April declaring that holding people there was unconstitutional and illegal.
The Nauru facility has also been under scrutiny after thousands of incident reports leaked to the Guardian Australia in August detailed allegations of widespread abuse and self-harm, including children wanting to kill themselves.
Advocacy group GetUp, which backs No Business in Abuse, welcomed Wilson’s decision and said it reflected a failure of the government’s asylum-seeker policies.
Despite criticism of its offshore policy, Australia’s conservative government has strongly defended it, saying it has halted the spate of boat arrivals, and drownings, of earlier years.